Those who avidly follow politics are sometimes called ‘the politically active’, ‘the political participatory class’ or ‘the attentive elite’ in academic literature but, informally, are often known as ’political tragics’, ‘politicos’ or ‘political junkies’. Overseas studies have found that people in this group are disproportionately ‘older, white, more affluent, well-educated, and male’ (Norris 1996:477; Norris et al 1999). They are also active media consumers who use multiple news sources (Saad 2005). In other words, political junkies tend to be news junkies and, as we saw in the previous chapter, they favour media such as broadsheets and public broadcasting. These elite media are consumed by ‘key policy and decision-makers, opinion-formers and issue-definers: elites in the political, business and cultural spheres, as well as university-educated professionals’ (McNair 2000:23). In many theories, this audience and its favourite media are the key to explaining media content and its power.

Whether their style of news is called ‘hard’, ‘serious’ or ‘quality’, elite media are usually viewed as the most information-rich and the ‘best’ examples of journalistic excellence. Studies have found people who access the ‘serious’ media tend to know more about politics, to participate more and to believe that their participation matters (Curran et al 2009; Newton 1999; Norris 2000; PRC 2007). For some political theorists, the politically active and well-informed citizens play such a crucial role that democracy can safely be left in their hands.

Looking at media audiences and their preferences gives us one part of a larger puzzle about why politicians expend such effort in reaching media audiences: why do they believe these efforts can make a difference to election results? To get to the heart of this, in this chapter I address four themes around political learning, attitude formation, voting behaviour and media effects. I focus on four main questions: (1) How much do Australians know about politics? (2) Are some media better than others at informing people? (3) Do audiences choose media outlets that accord with their partisan views? – and, finally, putting all of this evidence together – (4) What impact can media content really have during an election?

All of these individual questions about political learning, political attitude formation and media effects have spawned a vast literature and many different theories both in Australia and beyond. This is because, in the study of audiences, untangling causes, effects, correlations and associations is notoriously difficult. To take an example, if someone who reads the Age newspaper is more likely to vote Labor, is this because they have been influenced by its ‘left-wing’ content (see Chapter 11 for allegations of this nature), or is it because they were already a Labor supporter and selected the Age in the first place because its content seemed to fit well with their pre-existing views?

The reporting of elections has been transformed not only by shifts in media, technology and journalism, but because the way elections are conducted - the substance of what journalists have to report on – has also changed. Greater media focus and faster news cycles presented both demands and opportunities for politicians in the 2000s. Describing his experiences in the UK, Tony Blair (2007) related:

A similar process occurred in Australia.

This chapter looks at how politicians campaigned and provided the raw material of election news. Politicians and their advisers went to great lengths to influence election news through campaign organisation and political PR techniques in the 2000s. These techniques might have been aimed at short-term objectives (setting the day's news agenda or winning a six-week campaign), but they also had much broader effects on political reporting and the nature of Australian democracy. To consider these effects, we need to look beyond the last decade to see how campaigning evolved in Australia from the early days of Federation to an era of electronic and then digital media.

Election campaigns: from Federation to the 1990s

Travel and public meetings

Face-to-face interaction with voters was crucial to early campaigning and this was obviously much easier when electorates were small.

When the 2001 election was held, the Bulletin was still published. Nightline, Sunday and John Laws were still on air. The ABC website consisted of a string of text articles - no interactive maps, no video and no live vote-counting. The Packer family-with Kerry Packer in charge – still owned Channel Nine and the station was the undisputed ratings winner of the previous year. Only about 20 per cent of homes had pay TV (AFC 2005:62). Sky News existed but had not broadcast a dedicated election channel yet. Stephen Mayne's email newsletter Crikey had only begun the previous year. The Age and Sydney Morning Herald websites were updated irregularly. Wikipedia had only been in operation for a year. There was no YouTube and no Twitter. (They began in 2005 and 2006 respectively.) Blogging had begun in 1994 but ‘was not a recognised force in the political world’ and there was no social networking site ‘until Friendster in 2002, MySpace in 2003, and FaceBook in 2004’ (Schudson 2009:368).

It is not only media and technology that have been transformed. Reporting styles, journalism practice, audiences and the way politics is conducted have also changed. It will be a very different political reporting environment in another ten years' time. While we cannot anticipate all that will occur in the future, we can learn much by examining the recent past and thinking about how political reporting works, how it has changed and what we have both lost and gained in recent times.

In political reporting, there's no hotter issue than media bias. Politicians and their supporters regularly make allegations of political bias in news reporting. These are invariably followed by the steadfast denials of offended news workers. Bias contravenes one of the most basic assumptions about the nature of journalism - that journalists should be impartial in reporting news. Objectivity and impartiality were central to how modern journalism defined itself (Schudson 1994) and media institutions still commit themselves to those principles (Box 11.1).

When it comes to legislative requirements for impartiality, newspapers have more discretion than broadcasters because they developed from a very different environment. Limited analogue spectrum meant broadcasters had to be licensed because they were using a public resource and only a limited number could transmit at once. As part of this process, they were required to be impartial. Newspapers developed instead out of a history of ‘yellow’ (partisan) journalism and a tradition of press barons using their outlets to try to influence political debate. They developed from 17th-century battles over press censorship and repressive licensing that saw the notion of a ‘free press’ come to be seen as a cornerstone of democracy.

Advocating for a political position or party is still considered a ‘property right’ of owners. The Australian Press Council says a newspaper ‘has a right to take sides on any issue’ (APC 1977).

Politics is often reported as a narrative, with a plot focused on conflict, climax and resolution. This is the case even in ‘normal’ periods of politics but an election campaign has an especially well-defined beginning, middle and end. The campaign proper begins with the Prime Minister driving to meet the Governor-General and asking for a dissolution of Parliament. Television crews wait patiently outside Government House to capture the drive through the gates because this is so symbolic and represents the beginning of the campaign. In the middle – sometimes called the ‘rising action’ in literature – are the day-to-day campaign activities, especially of the leaders. These are all building up to the climax of polling day and are usually reported in those terms: what does this mean for the likely result?

On polling day, the Labor and Coalition leaders are recorded casting their own votes in their respective electorates. This is another highly symbolic moment, shown on all of the television news bulletins that night. Some of those bulletins then morph into election night programs dedicated to reporting the vote count. Once the result is known, the winning party leader gives a victory speech and the loser a concession speech, which mark the acceptance of victory and defeat. This is the end of the main story, but some resolution also occurs in the following few days as commentators analyse the meaning of the result.

The 2010 election was the first in Australia to feature a female prime minister. It came only 24 days after Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd in an unprecedented, overnight deposition of a sitting prime minister. It also produced an unusual result – a hung parliament and two weeks of machinations and deliberations before a minority Labor government was formed. Understandably, the more unusual elements of the campaign attracted most attention but there were still familiar patterns including an important paradox, which is explored in this book.

For those interested in following the campaign, more detailed and constantly updated information was available from multiple news sources. Yet there was also a sense that the election was playing out before an unusually disengaged electorate. On this latter point, the signs were mixed. The percentage of people casting an informal (invalid or blank) vote in 2010 went up, but not all of these were deliberate protest votes. Voter turnout only went down slightly, but this masked a bigger problem – declining voter enrolment. Over a million eligible Australians were missing from the electoral roll.

Of those who did vote, over 80 per cent gave their first preference to one of the major parties. However, a 4 per cent swing to the Greens, their success in winning a lower house seat for the first time, and the role four independents played in determining government encouraged claims that a ‘new politics’ was being forged out of a growing disillusionment with the major parties and ‘business-as-usual’ politics.

The internet is having an impact upon election news but also, more broadly, on news journalism and political communication. There are several dimensions to this that need to be considered. There is the impact on citizens and audiences (regarding who accesses online news, which sites they visit and what they do there), but also on news production and content: in what ways is the internet changing how news is gathered, reported and disseminated and how does this affect the economic models that major news organisations rely upon? Finally, there are also important questions about whether the internet has changed the nature of public debate, including claims that it has radically altered concepts such as ‘audiences’, ‘news’ and journalism in ways that will have profound implications for society and democracy.

Too often, all of these different elements are conflated in a debate that sees researchers and commentators divided starkly along cyber-enthusiast and cyber-sceptic lines. As Turner (2010:4) argues:

As I plunge headlong into that debate, I should first identify myself as what the media industry calls a ‘heavy internet user’ – I rely almost entirely on the internet for my news.

How many people watch, read or listen to political news? This is an important question because it influences everything about the way elections are reported. If no-one wants to follow political news, then media organizations (especially commercial ones) have little incentive to devote resources and time to it. Even if the media generate the best political journalism in the world - however this is defined – what is its value if no-one is paying attention?

Most theories about the media and politics assume that media audiences need information and opportunities to participate politically. The media are seen as crucial for delivering this and for facilitating the formation of public opinion, ideally through universal access and an unfettered flow of information and ideas (Habermas 1989). Yet this view may not necessarily fit with how media audiences see themselves and their media use, or with how news producers conceive of their audiences.

Media organisations place great significance on market research and audience profiling. However, while they seem to know a good deal about their audiences, they cannot always predict their desires or satisfy them; some of the key allegations of poor political reporting stem from claims that news producers do not understand their audiences as well as they think they do. According to some critics, news producers underestimate their audiences' information-processing abilities and overlook their democratic needs. Yet others imply the opposite: that news producers know their audiences only too well and pander to their ‘worst’ instincts.